Why You Should Watch Tonight's Wildly Unnecessary Debate

From a good-citizenship standpoint, you should watch tonight's third and final presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. From a practical, "I could be spending time relating to my kids" standpoint, no debate in history has been less necessary.

You could be forgiven if you already wanted to bail on all modern debates. Candidates memorize timed blurbs, and unabashedly distorted rebuttals makes the spontaneous dubious. We've so internalized debates' vapidity that even image consultants are redundant. Clinton shimmied—GIF that! You can take your pandering and fear-mongering original or extra crispy, but either way, you're going to feel gross after inhaling a bucket of it for two hours.

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But perhaps you have not lost hope in our political process. Allegedly, this debate should be policy heavy! Moderator Chris Wallace will bring some heat in one of his fits of, "Yes, I work for Fox News, but I could still get a job at an organization that practices journalism if I wanted."

And yet, Donald Trump will be there.

Trump has made the election a referendum on whether he's "so crazy it just might work" or "so crazy he might kill us all," making any engagement with him on policy a gesture of futility on par with Wile E. Coyote holding an umbrella over his head under the shadow of an approaching boulder.

You can take your pandering and fear-mongering original or extra crispy, but either way, you're going to feel gross.

The debate will be divided into six 15-minute segments on immigration, the economy, entitlements and debt, foreign policy, the Supreme Court, and "each candidate's fitness to serve as president." It will be exhausting, and all anyone wants to talk about is Trump's flameout anyway, so let's break down his policies in each category.

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IMMIGRATION

Build a wall. The wall would have to go over private property and mountains. It would be insanely expensive. It also would not work. It will not be built, obviating the need to compel Mexico to pay for it, which wouldn't happen anyways. Trump is also for a deportation force—or not, depending on the week.

THE ECONOMY

The economy is very bad, and we don't win anymore. Donald Trump will reverse this trend. How will he do it? By passing the savings onto you.

ENTITLEMENTS AND DEBT

Trump is for repealing Obamacare and replacing it with the plan Republicans drafted in 2009—whoops, sorry, no, we're still waiting for that seven years later. He will protect Social Security. He also hates how irresponsibly spendthrift Clinton is, which is why his tax plan will increase the debt by $5.3 trillion, concomitant with increased military spending and, one supposes, wall contractors.

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FOREIGN POLICY

Donald Trump will not start dumb wars, but we should bomb "them" and "take" "their oil," something else that will not happen, even if we figure out the proper nouns first. We will kill ISIS members' families, which is not only a war crime but an axe-based Whack-a-Mole cartoon of a war crime. Carl Icahn—the corporate raider who destroyed TWA and immiserated thousands of employees—will stop China by making good deals. If Trump's friend Vladimir Putin is hacking me, I ask that he only leak the tasteful nudes, and leak them with the beneficence of all great, blameless statesmen who definitely do not have journalists killed.

THE SUPREME COURT

Donald Trump will appoint anyone on a list handed to him by the Republican National Committee, but also cross out one and write in democracy-deploring Gawker-slayer Peter Thiel. Peter, if you are reading this, please do not sue me.

EACH CANDIDATE'S FITNESS TO SERVE AS PRESIDENT

Donald Trump is not fit to serve as president. Donald Trump isn't even fit to serve as president of the Official Brutus the Barber Beefcake Fan Club. Trump would collect $15 each for autographed glossies of the Barber, declare bankruptcy, then send out a mass email to all the Beefcake Boosters announcing his intention to sue the United States Postal Service for losing all their pictures, then append a follow-up email calling Ed Leslie (the Barber's real name) "a loser with a girl's name" and his fans "pathetic." He would then sell the fan club's address list to the same reverse-mortgage company that is keeping Fred Thompson's body alive in cryo-stasis inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

Trump has made the election a referendum on whether he's "so crazy it just might work" or "so crazy he might kill us all."

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Notice that, in the above list, you saw nothing about climate change, an existential threat that will create millions of refugees, destabilize economies and foreign policies, and affect entitlements, debt, and the court system. It will also eventually swallow Florida, where my family and I live, but we all knew this gig was temporary.

Notice, too, that I said nothing above about Hillary Clinton's policies. That's because they are unnecessary. Hillary Clinton is not Donald Trump. Really, that's enough. That's the trouble with apocalyptic narcissism: You expand the list of alternatives to include virtually anything else.

Clinton's policies are often opaque, in the tactically noncommittal way of all candidates, but they are not hidden. Nor are they like Trump's, in that they fit within a normative definition of "existing" as "policies." You can dig through papers on her website, or you can listen to any of her debates with Bernie Sanders, which feel like Lincoln-Douglas compared to whatever this will become. That information is there, mostly, if you want to find it.

It's a bitter irony for the party that tried so desperately to depict Barack Obama as "unvetted" by the media that they wound up with Trump. This election should have been a petri dish for a thousand near-fatal Clinton conspiracies. Instead, the GOP nominated a blowhard so compromised by scandal and so relentlessly erratically vile to Hispanics, blacks, Muslims, and women—to literally an overwhelming majority of humans on this planet—that his opponent could probably emcee a dogfighting ring backstage without drawing attention to herself.

You will not hear any of Donald Trump's policies tonight, because he does not have them. You will hear Hillary Clinton's policies, but she doesn't need them.

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